Celebrity meltdowns run the gamut — from Mel Gibson’s volcanic rants to Britney Spears’ head-shaving — but they also tend to follow a familiar path.

After the spectacle, the celebrity heads to rehab and emerges months later, sometimes for a contrite television interview.

Charlie Sheen has forged his own path. The star of the hit CBS-TV comedy “Two and a Half Men” won’t stop talking. There’s nothing contrite about him. And he sounds like a man who has lost his way.

While Sheen’s behavior is enriching the material for comedians, addiction and mental- health therapists aren’t laughing.

“A lot of us are just really sad for him,” said Arthur Schut, deputy director of Arapahoe House, a network of treatment facilities across metro Denver. Schut said he can’t diagnose Sheen, but “it looks like somebody unraveling due to heavy addiction. If you work in this field, you see people like this.”

He called Sheen’s high-profile display “remarkable.”

“This is somebody who has access to television,” he said. “You normally don’t give interviews to people in this state.”

In Sheen’s case, though, he has been hard to miss. Broadcast media — with the exception of CBS, which has stopped production of the show — is feasting on Sheen, fixing cameras on him as he talks about how he has “tiger blood” and is a “rock star from Mars” who smokes 7-gram rocks of cocaine, probably “more than anybody could survive.”

Drugs and alcohol at least contribute to the instability Sheen is exhibiting, said Dr. Deborah Serani, a clinical psychologist in New York. But she believes Sheen’s problems are deep-seated.

“The degree of mania for Sheen is almost a caricature, because it’s such an extreme case of bipolar disorder,” she said. The condition is marked by moods swinging between manic and depressed.

“With him off his drugs and alcohol (Sheen passed a drug and alcohol test Monday), we are getting a glimpse of the disordered kind of thinking people have when they are in a manic state. The rest of us who listen to him say, ‘He’s being unreasonable; it doesn’t make sense. Can’t he hear his own words?’ “

But Sheen seems to believe he is acting rationally.

“Mania feels good,” she said, and it is driving Sheen to talk. On the “Today” show. “Piers Morgan Tonight.” “The Howard Stern Show.” “2 0/20.” Even a long, and live, interview with the gossip website TMZ.com, broadcast from beside the pool of Sheen’s Los Angeles mansion, where he lives with his “goddesses” — a porn star and a former model.

While, like Schut, Serani said she can’t diagnose Sheen, she described his behavior as textbook bipolar. It’s likely he has been battling the disorder since he was young, she said, adding that his “bad-boy behavior” has masked the underlying psychological disorder. People conclude he’s just strung-out and wasted, due to the substance abuse.

Sheen needs professional guidance, Serani said. While he is manic, he is unlikely to seek assistance because he thinks he is invincible, she said. But when he crashes, there is a chance he will get help.

Sheen says he had a recent “epiphany” that drugs and alcohol were boring and just stopped using them.

Therapists said it is conceivable that he could just walk away from addictions, but it is unlikely.

The Charlie Sheen side show is upsetting, but it does offer lessons, said Pax Prentiss, the founder of Passages Malibu, a drug-treatment center in California.

“I think it can be good for teens,” he said. “This is what drugs and alcohol can do to you. Look at him. He’s a mess.”

If nothing changes — if Sheen continues to abuse booze and drugs — then he’s on a “path to death,” said Schut of Arapahoe House. He said people in the mental- health community have been talking about the Sheen spectacle and are astounded by the volume of drugs Sheen claims to have consumed.

Even Sheen seems awed by his drug consumption. But he believes it makes him special and strong, instead of how people see him — sad and weak.

Addiction “changes how you think and how you think of yourself,” Schut said. And it happens gradually.

“It creeps up on people,” he said. “Everybody else knows how sick they are, and they don’t know it.”

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